Essential health habits every entrepreneur needs

Has there been a time where you decided to get away from it all by distracting yourself? For example, you could be tired and bothered by a business decision and you decided to pig out on an ice cream buffet. I know this may not sound like a good idea in general, somehow, this helps you to feel better for a while, and might even promote clearer thinking.

For me, at one time, it was binge-watching Netflix. At some other time, it was playing mindless computer games. It wasn’t long before I realized that I needed to control my schedule, or my hobbies would end up controlling me!

Psychiatrist and physician Gabor Maté suggests that our ability to manage trauma causes addictive behavior, largely due to attempts to self-soothe.

The irony is that these self-soothing behaviors generally do work until a negative outcome is relevant to your future. For instance, you could still soothe yourself by eating ice cream buffets on a weekly basis, until you realize that you’ve put on a significant amount of weight! Based on the note above, it could also be aggravated by a reduction in sugar sensitivity, leading to an increase in your intake of sugar.

Incidentally, scrolling the internet and watching the screen for long periods of time may serve as a self-soothing mechanism. I’ve found that when someone is passing time or just trying to get a distraction from a heavy load of work, this scrolling behavior does help to alleviate that pressure. However, we also know that work that is not completed fuels a vicious cycle: you have too much to do, you turn to scrolling the internet mindlessly for soothing, leading to even more work that is undone.

In examining Flow, a psychological state where one is hyper productive and experiences a somewhat euphoric sensation of productivity, we know that there one can indeed improve immersion and attention in a task and enjoy the benefits of time distortion – where a lot of time passes, but you don’t feel it. Here are some ways to detach from self-soothing

• • Managing brainwaves.
    
    As you may know, the only way to manage our nervous system is to manage our breathing. When you learn to breathe effectively (there are hundreds of different breathing methods according to yogic traditions), it does affect your brainwaves, leading to a higher level of intentionality about self-management and being able to get back into states of flow.

• • Adjusting emotional states.
    
    Aside from brainwaves, many other methods can support emotional state management and regulation. One can change mental images and their quality. For example, when anxious, this state could cloud mental images and affect cognition. These will vary from individual to individual, so the idea is that shifting one’s attention to better and more resourceful memories could help to change the state from one that is limiting to one that is resourceful.

    I recently helped a client who was feeling like all the work that she had done at her company was for nothing after being fired. That ‘meaning connection’ in her brain created a lot of pain, as she was angry at the apparent betrayal. However, through a quick 20 minute coaching conversation with me to uncover her capabilities and her vision for the future, this anger dissipated when her perspective shifted away from focusing on the negativity of the firing to the new possibilities of her future.

  • Breathwork.

    I am still in awe of the work that Wim Hof has done. If you don’t know him, his famous Wim Hof Method is a breathing technique that was made popular as an amazing approach to taking ice baths. It also appears to help with cognition and sleep, leading to a higher level of restfulness or alertness as it is applied appropriately by a trained practitioner.
    
    One unspoken benefit of almost any breathwork technique is the attention to mindfulness. You can’t use these methods mindlessly! Inherent in the technique is some deliberate and intentional approach to breathe using specific rhythms and timings. The end result is that the mindful attention to this breathing in and of itself can be beneficial in releasing tension and meaning attachments.

    According to Viktor Frankl:

    “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
    
    Some would argue that exercise following a specific routine and intensity already helps you to shift your breathing deliberately, thereby showing the connection between breathing, flow and exercise routines. 

Yeah, I’m sure you’ve seen a boom in SaaS related to team working and productivity such as Monday and Asana. They offer the dream of productivity. However, the software itself does not make one productive. A productive individual is one who can use the software productively! In fact, a recent CNBC article highlights the irony of productivity initiatives. It is probably time to focus on a way to productively recharge ourselves rather than to amplify only our output.

Hence, you don’t need a system for productivity. You need a system to manage your nutrition! As a self-soothing pattern, some entrepreneurs end up numbing themselves, either with heavy drinking (alcohol) or some other substance that impairs their cognition and focus rather than creating a proper system to work on their own nutrition. Unfortunately, you might have guessed it – the science of nutrition is also fairly complex… and tedious!

Here are some actions to adopt in order to shift from a haphazard nutritional protocol to a systematic one.

• • Understand and act on Inflammation and the Insulin Response.

    
    I learnt about the issues of inflammation from chiropractor turned nutrition researcher, Dr. Eric Berg. The problem with many of our foods is that they are processed or genetically modified. Cheaper vegetable oils are often used to fry food, creating a slow and steady increase in inflammation that we don’t see except after a really long time (decades). We mistake this for ageing: itchy skin, swelling, or an irritable bowel. Berg recommends that one aims to reduce this kind of inflammation through a variety of anti-inflammatory foods, such as Omega-3 fatty acids, removing sugar from the diet (which is one of the largest sources of inflammation), and turning to a higher healthy fat diet (which only comes from animals that are not fed genetically modified foods).

    The Insulin Response is covered by Berg as well as Dr. Jason Fung, a prominent cardiologist. He echoes Berg’s research and because he treats a number of people for diabetes. He reported that the more sugar more frequently spikes insulin in your system. And sugar comes in many forms, including “fruit juices” and frequent snacking in between meals, especially with high glycemic foods and refined carbohydrates. The more frequently it spikes, the less able the body can produce insulin to take sugar out of the system, leading to diabetes.

    Both recommend a protocol of intermittent fasting and reduction of added sugars in your food or drinks, among others. The end effect is not just a healthier and sharper mind. It has an unexpected benefit of reducing body fat as well! I’d highly recommend you visit their YouTube channels for more education from these prominent researchers.

• • Study the cycles of care to support vital organs that provide digestion, energy and sleep.

    
    Another researcher of note is Dr. Zach Bush. His research suggests that there is a powerful effect of ensuring that our energy-generating engine, our gut, is properly lined with the right kind of and quantity of microbes.
    
    Of course, when I first heard that energy was produced by the gut, I wasn’t quite fond of the idea myself! It meant that there were things we needed to do to manage our gut bacteria (and it ain’t drinking sugary yogurt drinks like Vitagen or Yakult). Trillions of microbes exist in perfect symbiosis inside our system. And often, we kill these beneficial bacteria when we consume antibiotics – whether intentionally or not – that are infused in our ecosystem and food. This is because glyphosate is often used as a herbicide in large scale crop dusting. Unfortunately, it also kills gut bacteria, leading to a drop in your body’s ability to generate energy.
    
    There is evidence that suggests your gut microbes are responsible for your mental health. In that sense, having a healthy ecosystem for your gut is likely to increase your well-being too. This could be the reason why walks in nature are so refreshing – microbes are concentrated in such areas and can lead to a much higher ingestion of them into your system, replenishing it and your ability to eliminate your brain fog and lack of focus. In that sense, the most powerful organ in your body could well be your gut!